Facing growing customs delays at Dulles

If you’re returning to the United States from overseas, you may want to think twice before booking your return through Washington’s Dulles International Airport.

Two of our colleagues spent about an hour and a half in the customs line this weekend, missing their connecting flight to Albany. Four weeks earlier, we had passed through customs at Dulles and also were stunned at how crowded the customs hall was and how long the lines were. We were in line nearly an hour.

We had been forewarned. Financial Times columnist Tyler Brule wrote in his Sept. 17 column of having to wait in line for an hour and a half. He’d had a perfectly miserable experience at the airport.

Our colleagues eventually got standby seats on the last flight of the evening back to Albany, although their layover in Dulles had grown to seven hours.

We’re not sure why the process has become so tedious at Dulles. We’ve gone through there many times, and the lines have not been onerous. The customs officials have been uniformly polite and efficient.

But within the past few months all of that has seemed to unravel.

While the officials are still polite, there seems to be fewer of them on duty. One of our colleagues counted just six of 18 booths staffed. We had counted seven unstaffed booths on our trip through.

ICE, as Immigrations and Customs Enforcement is known, has begun an automated program, Global Entry, that collects biometric data, and conducts extensive background checks and a half-hour face-to-face interview, before approving U.S. travelers for participation. The fee is $100 for five years, and after our latest Dulles experience, we’ll be looking into applying. (You’ll pay another $119 if you apply through an independent contractor, and even more if you choose expedited service.)

It’s a shame that ICE processing has become such a problem at a time when Dulles is making other improvements to help passengers move around, including its recently opened underground subway connecting the terminal and concourses. We found it fast, frequent and efficient, unlike the old buses on stilts that moved on the tarmac between buildings.